Category — Nutrition

“At Sesame Street, we’re committed to helping children grow up smarter, stronger, and kinder, and an important part of being stronger is being healthy.”

Press Release
Produce Marketing Association
Feb 17, 2015

Newark, Del. — The fresh produce industry’s efforts to inspire children to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables through ‘eat brighter!’, a movement forged by Produce Marketing Association (PMA), Sesame Street and the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), is gaining national attention this week through a video starring First Lady Michelle Obama, Sesame Street’s Big Bird, and NBC Parks and Recreation actor and FunnyOrDie.com comedian Billy Eichner of Billy on the Street.

Billy Eichner is an Emmy-nominated comedian whose work can be viewed on the award-winning comedy website, Funny Or Die, co-founded by Will Ferrell. Billy’s popularity with the millennial audience is anchored by his 2 million+ following, and his reach is growing. Billy on The Street episodes, a recurring segment on the website, will begin to air on TBS’ TruTV. His work can also be viewed on Tuesday evenings on NBC’s Park and Recreation, starring Amy Poehler.

A Bangkok-based start-up called EnerGaia is pioneering a unique urban farming model. Across the city’s neglected rooftops, a small team of chemists and engineers are growing a nutritional supplement which also happens to be one of the planet’s oldest life forms: spirulina.

This organism is a fast-growing blue-green algae with an estimated protein content of 60 percent and contains essential fatty acids and vitamins. In fact, this superfood grows rapidly without the need for soil or fertilisers and can convert carbon dioxide from industry into to a highly nutritious food.

After much trial and error, the result was GreenOnyx, a countertop machine that cultivates and grows the sea vegetable automatically and then delivers the nutritious green food source at a push of a button in either liquefied or paste form.

The juice can then be used to make smoothies and the paste can be used to add nutritious to nearly any meal.

The role that urban agriculture in providing street food vendors with safe, fresh and nutritious produce at a low cost.

Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition
Until Dec 8, 2014

Street foods in urban areas are often the most accessible means of obtaining an affordable meal for millions of consumers every day and urban and periurban agriculture can provide street food vendors with the required local, fresh, nutritious and less expensive ingredients.

Heather Hava, right, who is working on a doctorate in aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, describes a computerized system she is developing with other graduate students participating in the exploration HABitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge.

The ROGR robots can visit a specific plant to deliver water or to locate and grasp a fruit or vegetable. If an astronaut requests tomatoes for a salad, the system decides which specific plants have the ripest tomatoes and assigns parallel harvesting tasks to ROGR.

By Bob Granath
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida
July 7, 2014

Excerpt:

For more than a half-century, NASA has made the stuff of science fiction into reality. Researchers are continuing that tradition by designing robots to work in a deep-space habitat, tending gardens and growing food for astronaut explorers. It sounds like a concept from Star Wars, but a team of graduate students from the University of Colorado Boulder is now developing the innovative technology to make it possible.

As astronauts explore beyond Earth, they will need to make their habitat as self-sustaining as possible. This includes growing fruits and vegetables.

The special feature in this edition highlights the contribution of trees, shrubs and other woody plants to food and nutrition as acknowledged in the first ever ?State of the World‘s Forest Genetic Resources? report published by FAO in June 2014. Also under the Special Feature, Martin Nganje points to the fact that forests contribute directly towards food security and improved nutrition on the African continent through their non-timber forest products. Moreover, he examines how forests contribute towards food self-sufficiency in ways other than through their edible parts. Michela Conigliaro , Simone Borelli and Fabio Salbitano in turn provide some examples of how the efforts towards the protection and restoration of forests and tree cover in and around African cities can make a substantive contribution to alleviating poverty and reducing malnutrition and in ensuring a more environmentally and socio-economically sustainable urban development.

Kass takes inner-city students in Washington on tours of the White House garden

By Jennifer Steinhaueraug
New York Times
28, 2014

Excerpt:

Mr. Kass is expected to stay through the end of the president’s second term as one of the last remaining original staff members of this White House, perhaps for no other reason than his love of the garden, where 1,000 pounds of food are grown each year, much of it served on the premises.

“He has this bizarre affection for a fig tree,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, whose blog, ObamaFoodorama.com, documents the eating life of the White House. She was describing a tree that grew from a sapling donated to the White House by Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate. Once, she said, the tree was accidentally yanked up and tossed with the weeds, but Mr. Kass rescued it.

There are a dozen gardens across the Rochester area with the goal of producing more in the years ahead.

By Josh Nichols
WHEC
07/30/2014

Excerpt:

Patty Love, Director of Lotsoffood.org, said, “Lots of Food is about growing food on lots, especially on empty urban lots or lots that are being mowed as lawn, right now, where we could be growing food instead. The idea is with these lots, we can produce lots. We can produce lots of food. We have a number of people, not only living in poverty, but living in food deserts, areas where they don’t have access to fresh healthy food. All of those things are really important to changing the fabric of our community and uplifting everyone.”

City of Waco Senior Planner Felix Landry says the city’s food deserts have been a major concern for many who work for the City.

By Jill Ament
KWBU
July 28, 2014

Excerpt:

It’s hard to find healthy food in some Waco neighborhoods. These so-called “food deserts” often occur when grocery stores are too far away and residents are left to get nourishment from convenience stores or fast food. Urban gardening is just one way the city is combating these food deserts.

Kids attending Farm Camp at the World Hunger Relief headquarters outside of Waco are learning how to live sustainably. The kids are recruited from Waco ISD and they’re playing a game based on recycling, composting and other ways to get rid of trash. Campers run across a field, sorting trash between recycling, garbage and compost.

An introduction to cooking with local, seasonal, foraged, homegrown, fresh, and free-range produce. Recipes allow a variety of ingredients to be used, with vegetarian and vegan alternatives.

This is the ultimate introduction to economical, seasonal, and delicious cooking. The Permaculture Kitchen is written by a passionate smallholder and cook who explains how to make tasty meals using seasonal, foraged, homegrown, local, fresh, and free-range produce, including meat, and sustainably caught fish. This is a cookbook for gardeners who love to eat their own produce, and for people who enjoy a weekly veggie box, or supporting their local farmers’ market.

Intermarché launched Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables earlier this year to prove that unattractive produce is just as edible

By Martha Cliff
Mail
16 July 2014 |

Excerpt:

The campaign by Intermarché is supported by advertising agency Marcel who, with the help of photographer Patrice de Villiers, produced seven posters starring the unattractive produce to go alongside it.

The posters included images of the grotesque apple, the ridiculous potato, the hideous orange, the failed lemon, the disfigured eggplant, the ugly carrot, and the unfortunate clementine.

Children’s Hospital of San Antonio is partnering with the Culinary Institute of America-San Antonio to establish a teaching kitchen at the downtown hospital to offer nutrition and cooking courses to patients and the community. Photo by Edward A. Ornelas / San Antonio Express-News.

The teaching kitchen and garden will be the first of their kind at a children’s hospital in San Antonio

By Jessica Belasco
San Antonio Express-News
June 4, 2014

Excerpt:

The teaching kitchen will be instrumental in teaching the community the awareness of the relationship between food and health, he said.

The organic vegetable and herb garden, designed by Overland Partners Architects and Co’Design, will bring “the healing work of nature” to the downtown campus for patients and families to learn, play and meditate, said John Bel, president of the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio Foundation.

June 12, 2014 – Remarks by the First Lady Before White House Garden Harvest Event
State Dining Room

(Must see. Mike)

First Lady Michelle Obama and West Virginia Department of Education Office of Child Nutrition Executive Director Richard Goff help students from five District of Columbia schools make a meal using the summer crop from the White House Kitchen Garden in the State Dining Room at the White House June 12. The students, who helped plant the garden earlier in the year, were joined by visiting school nutrition directors from Orlando, Dallas and West Virginia, where they have seen success in their new school lunch programs thanks to the standards put in place by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

“The thing about plants is they’re harmonious,” he said. “They do one thing: grow. I wish we were more like that.”

By Patricia Borns
Miami Herald
May 18, 2014

Excerpt:

Helped by seed money from the Broward Regional Health Planning Council, the city set out 2,500 grow bags — plastic bags filled with soil and nutrients — on city-owned land that had been a magnet for dirt bikers and trash. Besides being a productive growing medium, the bags safeguarded against possible saltwater intrusion and potential contaminants from a nearby warehouse site, PATCH’s management team said.

Edible City is a fun, fast-paced journey through the local Good Food Movement that’s taking root in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the nation and around the world. Introducing a diverse cast of extraordinary and eccentric characters who are challenging the paradigm of our broken food system, Edible City digs into their unique perspectives and transformative work— from edible education to grassroots activism to building local economies— finding hopeful solutions to monumental problems. Inspirational, down-to-earth and a little bit quirky, Edible City captures the spirit of a movement that’s making real change and doing something truly revolutionary: growing the model for a healthy, sustainable local food system.